Saturday, 31 December 2016

Someone, (I think the novelist L.
P. Hartley, but I’m likely wrong) once said something along the lines of ‘The
past is a different country. They do things differently there’. And herein lies the crux of the problem that I
have been vaguely gesturing at in some
recent (and probably much older) posts. How on earth do we interpret ancient texts?
Indeed, who can interpret ancient texts?

Texts are used for many purposes,
and the purposes that we read them for are, in fact, fairly unlikely to be the
purposes they were originally written for, nor, indeed, the purposes the
original readers would have been interested in. So, for example, we might be
interested in finding out how many rifle armed militia men were present at an
American revolutionary war battle. An account of that battle may say something
like ‘The rifle bullets came so thick the sky was black with them and no man
dared to raise his head for fear of them’. While this text might tell us that
rifle armed troops were present, it really does not tell us much more than
that, aside what it felt like to be on the receiving end. We could also raise
further questions, such as how did the writer know that the incoming bullets
were rifle rounds, anyway.

Already, from a simple and
made-up example we can observe a few of the problems in texts. Firstly, we
question the text in ways that the original writer, readers and the text itself
could not, probably, have formed the questions. Secondly, the text might not be
entirely accurate, in terms of modern ‘accuracy’. The problem of the unreliable
narrator is one thing: the text might be enhancing the author’s own feelings of
bravery and significance, for example. Secondly, the writer is not omnipotent. Things
were almost certainly happening about which the author knew little or nothing. Their
text is but a snapshot of the world as it seemed to be.

Next up we also have problems
from the interpreter’s end. Our world is not the world of the author. Their world
view is different, their language, meanings and values will all vary from our
own. For example, even World War Two memoirs reflect a society very different
from our own, one where, at least in the UK, society was more deferential, at
least on the surface, than it is today. We have to attend to the social
location of the writer and their readers to start to apprehend what their
meaning might be.

There are further issues, of
course. It is quite likely that the original text was written in a language
which is not that of the modern reader. There are issues of translation, from,
say, Latin into English. Languages are not one-to-one translatable. Interpretation
is required. For example, where the Hebrew Bible in English refers to God being
patient, the Hebrew (apparently) literally means something like ‘long of
nostril’. The idea, as I understand it, is that it takes longer for the snort
of exasperation to be emitted. And so a translation is ‘patient’. As my Old Testament tutor put it: ‘I just thought
you might like to know that’. But it
does indicate the sorts of problems we encounter here.

This is all very well, but it is
not helping the wargamer’s cause, wanting to know how many men with rifles to
deploy on the battlefield. And here we approach the rub, perhaps. Wargamers
cannot really go with ‘we don’t know’. We need a concrete number of figures on
the table, not just ‘around so many’. Granted, we can pick a number which makes
it reasonable that the opposition will have bullets whistling around their ears
most of the time, but that is an interpretation of the text resting on some,
perhaps dubious, guesswork.

So we hit the main part of the
problem. We have to interpret texts to extract the answer, but how do we do
this and who can do it? If we admit that authenticity is in some sense part of
historical wargaming, and that we derive any such sense from the texts which
speak of the battles we are interested in, whom on earth can say that this is
the right way to interpret the text?

The question of authority in
interpreting texts is a major problem. For example, if the text is a religious
one, such as the Bible, the issue becomes whether the text can be interpreted
as historical, objectively, ‘scientifically’ and so on, or whether the text can
only be interpreted by those within the faith community, perhaps who have some
authorisation to do such interpretation. You only need to consider the history
of interpretation within a particular denomination to start to realise the
complexities that can arise here (and which are still argued over,
extensively).

In wargaming we do not have quite
the same issue over faith, although some of wargamers sacred cows, such as
Alexander being Great because he conquered practically everywhere, start to
bear a slightly uncomfortable feeling of blind faith. But still the question arises:
in a diverse and diffuse community, who can interpret the texts. There is, of
course, no one interpretation of texts, and one view would be to leave it to
the experts. However, with a few exceptions, professional historians do not
tend to wargamers. They interpret within their academic community. Only by
interpretation of their interpretations can wargamers use this material. This
gets complicated.

Short of advising all wargamers
to obtain advanced degrees in history, perhaps the way forward is to ensure
that we retain a level of critical engagement with the sources and the texts of
wargaming. There will be multiple interpretations of ancient (or, as noted
above, more recent) texts. We, as wargamers, do not in general have the
resources to follow all the lines of inquiry, but as intelligent human beings
we can engage critically with them. This, of course, applies to the texts of
wargaming, such as rules and army lists, as well of the primary source material
of history.

I think that there is a lot more
to be thought about here, and a lot more to be written, but I do think that the
task might be quite important for wargaming, otherwise we will just sit around,
thinking that some classic of wargaming literature was the ultimate in wargame experience.

Saturday, 24 December 2016

It may just be me, but there seem
to be a number of dark clouds hovering over my reading this year. In the first
place, I read and commented on here Geoffrey Parker’s ‘Global Crisis’, which
was a fascinating if rather depressing read. Part of the argument is that the
world’s leaders pretty well carried on with their squabbles and wars, ignoring
the plight of their rapidly impoverishing, starving, disease ridden populations.
Leaders stood upon their dignity, rights and, in some cases, divine
appointment. Somewhere around a third of the world’s population died.

I am currently, as I mentioned the
other week, reading Jonathon Sumption’s ‘Cursed
Kings’, the fourth volume of his Hundred Years War series. France in 1400 was a
happy, peaceful, prosperous place. The only problem, really, was that the king
was, more often not, bonkers. But that was fine, because there was a range of
princes all ready and willing to take up the reins of government.

Shame they fell out among
themselves over who got the biggest cut of looting the treasury and taxes. By
1414 France was undergoing a civil war, both government and princes were deeply
in debt and the tax burden had skyrocketed. Across the Channel, Henry V, having
succeeded his father and played a large part in crushing rebels against him,
was bent on invading France. He did not seem to be particularly bothered on
which side in the civil war he intervened on. The scene is now set for another
round of devastation, caused by world leaders.

This blog has never been a
political one. After all, it is about my hobby, wargaming, and not about current
events, modern conflicts and the news. The litany of appalling and callous
leadership of the past, however, has started to make me wonder about the
present. Not that I wish to debate recent events and elections across the
globe, but to raise fears about leaders and mandates that appear to be as
misguided as those claimed by our medieval and early modern leaders. I dare say
that the cult of management and leadership with which the world is becoming
ever more infected does not help either.

Still, I am trying not to be
depressed this Christmas tide. Incidentally, might I remind the rest of the
world (it seems) that Christmas strictly starts at sun down on 24th
December, not sometime in November? The bit before Christmas is Advent; it is a
time of preparation and fasting, at least in traditional terms, rather than
spending money we do not have and eating things we really, secretly, do not
like. I mean, does anyone really like mince pies? Seriously?

My mood is probably not being improved
by a number of medical semi-crises this year, and the fact that the estimable
Mrs P has to dash around like a mad thing validating everyone else’s ‘Xmas Warm
Fuzzies’ at this time of year.

It is enough to make me say ‘Bah,
Humbug!’ But I shall refrain, and wish you all a Merry Christmas.

Saturday, 17 December 2016

We forget, often, as wargamers, I suspect, that there is such
a thing as history. I do not really think this is unique to wargamers, but it
does happen quite frequently in wargaming. We can, and do, argue over whether,
for example, the French Medieval Ordonnance army would triumph over the legions
of first century Rome. Whether this is a sensible question or not is rather
moot, but given that we can find the argument, it must be at least an
intelligible question.

We are not alone. History is one of those strange things
that pops up rather more often than we suppose, and can quietly modify our
positions, or be modified by them. The spate of ‘false news’ planted during
recent elections is a case in point. As George Orwell put it in 1984, he who controls
the present controls the past, and he who controls the past controls the
future. False news is an attempt to control the present. It is, in postmodernist
terms, an attempt to make the present conform to how you would like it to be. Whether
the item is true or false is irrelevant here; if we remake to world to our
taste, the tool we use to manufacture it is not important.

Of course, over history, people have always attempted to
make real their own beliefs and desires. Even in medieval times (referring back
to Sumption’s Hundred Years War books) the various sides, at various times,
issued manifestoes which they believed would bring all right thinking people
onto their side. We, they say, are the true rulers of this or that territory,
and our claim is just and based on these facts. That the other side could and
did do the same was neither here nor there.

The historian, as I have said before, is thus faced with a ‘two
frame’ problem. They have to understand the world viewa of the original
protagonists, and then match that into language from their own world view. These
things vary in space and time. History is always going to be written and
rewritten. There is no such thing as a total, accurate and complete history.

Wargaming, of course, adds another frame to the pile. We view
history in a certain way, through high politics, strategy, war, campaigns,
battles, armies and generals. We add also other constraints, such as wargame
figures, tables, dice and so on. Our view of a battle can be constrained by
what we can place on a table, or represent in rules. If we are not careful with
our history, the rules can become that history, the toys can be the actors, and
we really do launch out into some sort of fantasy and alternate history.

There is nothing wrong with that per se, of course. But it
is a good thing if we do at least recognise what we are doing. When we start to
design our army according to a given army list, we are starting to flatten
history out. Each army comes from a given context: a time, place, set of
circumstances. When we reduce that to something like zero to six mounted
knights, we are reducing that context to something else – a set of marks on a
page, which only mean something in the context of a set of rules.

We have to do this sort of thing, to an extent at least, in
order to cope with the sheer complexity of the past. I would defy anyone, at
least in the English speaking world, to really get a grip on the history and
politics of the German states in the medieval period. Some sort of
simplification, if not case based study, has to be undertaken here. Otherwise
we would be bewildered and unable to achieve anything, let alone a wargame.

Yet this very flattening of the historical complexity leads
us, perhaps unwittingly, down the road of comparing legions with Medieval French.
Once we do start to flatten out the contexts, the comparisons become easier. I start
to compare, not one army with another, but one set of sorts of bases with
another. Within the context of the rules the comparison is sensible, or at
least intelligible. Within the context of history, of course, it is liable to
be laughed at.

Wargamers, then, sometimes unwittingly, sometimes
deliberately, flatten out the context of history. I do not really have a
problem with that, so long as we realise what we are doing. If we want to have
a game of Aztecs against Ming Chinese then there is no real issue: in this
case, the game is the thing as we know that it is a game, at least as long as
we have some idea about history and geography. When we start to lose that
knowledge, we are probably heading into dubious waters.

The problem is, of course, that we cannot simply compare the
battlefield performance of different armies from different periods or times. The
Aztecs had a different view of what a battle or a war meant from the Ming (I
imagine they did, anyway). The cultures from which the armies arose were
different. They had differing world views. A battle, in short, meant different
things. Who won could be less relevant than the meaning of the affair. Losing
well could be, for example, more noble and therefore acceptable than winning by
subterfuge.

As wargamers we are apt to forget these sorts of nuances. We
could, in fact, be accused of clinging onto a classical world view, whereby
there is one culture and everyone else is a barbarian. If they do not follow
our rules, our precepts, our world view, then they should jolly well have it
imposed upon them. We flatten out the cultures to our convenience. In wargaming
terms, everyone gets treated like, say, Napoleonic British infantry, only more
or less bad. The fact that the Aztecs would not have even recognised such a
style of warfare is neither here nor there.

By our flattening out of history, therefore, we are imposing
a kind of cultural imperialism on the past. It is made to conform to our rules,
our expectations, our world view. We could argue that this is inevitable, and
to an extent I would agree. But it is
only really acceptable when we recognise it for what it is.

Saturday, 10 December 2016

I am currently engaged in reading
the fourth volume of Jonathon Sumption’s History of the Hundred Year’s War.
This volume is called ‘Cursed Kings’ and covers 1400 – 1422. Big wars, someone
once said, deserve big books. Sumption’s volume is about 900 pages long, and is
of a similar size to his previous efforts. Big war, big book.

Sumption’s is a volume that
should be dear to every wargamer with an interest in history. It is a history
of big things: Kings, wars and battles. High politics is the centre stage, both
within and between countries. While intellectual and cultural developments are
nodded to, Sumption is interested in other things, the decisions of
politicians, the efforts of generals and soldiers, the contingency of things.

Of course, he covers other
things. War, especially the destructive and debilitating kind of the medieval
period, was often followed, if not accompanied by, famine, plague and
pestilence. The second volume of the series chronicled in depressing detail the
destruction of France by war, routier
gangs, plague and dislocation. Life as a peasant became nasty, brutish and
short. Life as anyone else was not hugely better, unless you were a great noble
or king.

By 1400, of course, the situation
had improved massively. Most of France proper had been recaptured during the
1380’s. There was a truce with England, with a suggestion that a permanent peace
might be on the cards. France was prospering. There were only a few dark clouds
on the horizon. Firstly, Richard II of England was deposed and murdered by
Henry of Lancaster. As Richard was married to a French princess, this caused
alarm in Paris, but as Henry IV had been supported by Louis of Orleans in his
bid for the English throne, not much was going to be done about that, except
increasingly impolite requests for the 13 year old girl to be returned to
France and (rather more optimistically) the return of her jewels and dowry.

The second cloud was the insanity
of the French King. From the early 1380’s he had lapses into what appears to be
paranoid schizophrenia, or something similar. Ruling the country during the
king’s ‘absences’ became increasingly difficult. This was exacerbated by the
existence of a number of the king’s uncles, the Queen, and Prince Louis, who
proceeded to loot the state of taxes and fall out among themselves. The number
of times France stood on the edge of civil war in the early 1400’s are quite
large. Eventually, of course, it all fell apart.

The English were not in any
better state, and were probably worse off. The English crown was without money,
and Parliament, as Parliaments were wont to do, assumed that the king should be
able to live off his own income and not bother the state for taxes (the Long
Parliament of the early 1640’s had the same view). Henry IV was, as an usurper,
weak anyway and had to spend to maintain a glorious court (to establish the
mystique of kingship), buy off supporters and semi-supporters, and to try to
fight off pretenders, the Scots, the Welsh (Glendower) and protect Gascony and
Calais.

Given all this, it is a wonder
that there were so few battles. All right, Shrewsbury happened in 1403, when
Hotspur rebelled. There were some ambushes and a couple of small scale battles
in Wales. But the big plans for invasion rarely were delivered. For example,
Louis had a wonderful strategic vision for a multiple invasion of English
assets – an assault on Calais, an invasion of Gascony, an expeditionary force
to Wales to invade England in association with Glendower, and persuasion on the
Scots to invade the north. Such a combination would have been very difficult
for Henry to survive.

Of course, it all came to
something and nothing. A few men at arms landed in Wales, only to have their
shipping dispersed by the English. They helped to capture a couple of castles
for the Welsh, but the invasion of England petered out as Glendower was
unwilling to risk poorly armed Welsh levies against English men-at-arms, even
with French support. The invasion of Gascony went ahead, and landed up with the
capture of a castle or two and a threatening of Bordeaux. The commercial ties
between the city and England, however, meant that there was no way for the
French to make much progress. Threats to Calais fell apart anyway, immured in
the politics of the French court.

Overall, then, we have a huge
range here of ‘missed’ battles. Battles that might have happened, but did not.
These non-battles did not happen because of a variety of reasons – malice, timorousness,
incompetence and impoverishment. The crowns involved simply could not afford to
implement their grandiose schemes. Further, the grasp of geography was a bit
dodgy, as well. Louis seems to have thought that the Welsh and Scots could
unite somewhere in the English Midlands and march on London. Well, perhaps they
could, but it was a lot further than he seems to have thought.

Finally, there was logistics.
Feeding an army was a problem. Living off the land was one way of going
forward, but most farming was subsistence. There was not that much surplus food
around. Established garrisons, such as those around Calais were small for a good
reason: they could be fed. Paying an army was another problem. Both sides could
and did raise money from Estates and by loans from merchants. But when nothing
much was achieved, the taxes set aside for war were spent anyway, and the
Estates grumbled and demanded investigations into corruption and misuse before
being willing (let alone able) to vote for any more.

For a wargamer, of course, these
are rich pickings. Some of the battles which did not happen are so much more
interesting than those that did. There were, for example , several times that
Edward III offered battle in the years before Crecy, sometimes in much less
favourable circumstances than in 1345. What would have happened if the French
could have taken the gambit? Similarly, the invasions scenario outlined above
could make the basis of a good campaign. As wargamers, we can magic the
logistical problems away; we still have coordination as an issue, but who can
tell what might have happened. I might even be typing this blog in French (or
Welsh).